READ IT HERE INSTEAD: 🕊🕊🕊🕊
When my mother is a sixteen year old child, she drops out of high school and marries my dad in her backyard, dewy eyed and pregnant with my older brother. The wedding is Hawaiian luau themed and she wears a purple garment with hibiscus print since she’s unworthy of wearing white. My father wears a white suit.
She turns to face the back window as she rides away in the passenger seat post wedding. My grandma waves from the long driveway, and my mother thinks, “Why is she letting me do this? Why isn’t she stopping me?” Two years later she is pregnant with me.
Child marriage, somehow still legal in 44 US states, is never referenced by anyone.
Because that’s not us. That’s for people in foreign countries who don’t even have shoes. Our family is Saved, even if my parents did initially commit ~PREMARITAL SEX~. Premarital sex is a big, huge, gigantic, colossal, tremendous sin. It is a buzz term being pounded across my psyche at a steady cadence in spite of its total absence from the Bible. At Sunday school, they tell us it fits under the seventh commandment: it’s basically adultery against your future spouse. What!!? I can’t bear the thought of disappointing my future spouse.
Sex is perfectly beautiful because it leads to babies, who are beautiful. But you can only attain beautiful sex through marriage, which has me shuddering at my older brother’s nefarious conception. My little mind carves space for each contradiction, one stacked on top of the other like smooth Lego bricks. I do not challenge.
But I am praised for memorizing Bible verses I have no context for, I go to church twice a week, and I sing to a long-dead prophet in a dark room with my palms facing up in a gesture of receiving (a song featuring lyrics about Jesus’s blood). It makes perfect sense not to challenge any of it.
Premarital sex and sexual immorality are used interchangeably.
No.
Freaking.
WAY.
Am I going to commit premarital sex like my stupid idiot parents did!
I almost enjoy the look I get when people discover how young my parents are. There is currency in shock value, and I brandish shock easily, turning my inherited shame into a sort of armor.
Inside, I carry their mistake as penance. I will do better. I will make them proud.
At a Christian youth conference, I sign up for purity camp in the church lobby. Due to the commonly held belief that anything with the word Christian = safe, I know my grandparents will sponsor it without question.
One evening at the camp we must wear our insecurity around our neck after sharpie-ing it on a piece of computer paper. Fourteen year olds walk around with “anorexic”, “cutter”, “lost my virginity” signs dangling from their necks like dental bibs. Can chastity cure them all?
The key speaker wears a blond messy bun and Rocket Dog platform flip flops: unmistakably cool. She talks about being sexually abused by her brother’s friend because she didn’t plan ahead to wait till marriage. But then she found Jesus who reminded her she was still worthy, and Jesus sent her a husband. She and the husband now enjoy peaceful, Jesus-approved marriage sex.
There is no distinction at all between sexual assault and plain old consensual sex. They’re both premarital.
At the end of camp there’s a teary ceremony where we each pledge to save ourselves while our guardians watch and give us gifts. Some girls receive sterling silver purity rings, which I desperately want but know better than to expect. My parents don’t know my ring size and neither do I. Still, I feel powerful. I have something of value. I have virginity.
I understand sex as transactional in a much more profound way than mere legal tender.
In return for my waiting to cash in, I will be granted approval from my uppers, a praiseworthy marriage, and an incredible sex life. We leave purity camp with a compelling slogan tattooed on our hearts: True Love Waits.
I begin intellectually separating myself into slices. My physical body is a kind of precious gemstone - fearfully and wonderfully made [Psalm 139:14]. Heck, all I did was get fertilized in my mom’s baby basket and I’m already fearful. Apparently being fearfully-made is a good thing, but there are so many figures of speech that it’s hard keeping track of the literal ones vs. the other ones. Like, Jesus’s flesh is french bread and his blood is inky Welch’s grape juice served in minuscule plastic cups - delicious. That one’s easy.
My flesh is waaay too capable of sin to be consumed. Completely untrustworthy!
My flesh is like a white pair of pants you’re afraid to wear in case they get stained. My flesh is preserved in a jar c/o my future husband, cold water, delicate cycle. In the meantime the holy spirit is welcome anytime. I imagine Him using my body as a rec room. Maybe it even has a foosball table or some beanbag chairs! I hope He’s comfortable in there.
After reading a popular pro courtship book called I Kissed Dating Goodbye, the perils of dating without intent to marry are more evident than ever. It turns out even kissing before marriage is crazy dangerous. The book is written by a very confident 21 year old who has cracked the entire code despite barely having dated.
I become hyper vigilant, terrified of dating or even developing. But I know my entire life will commence the moment I have a husband, and nobody counters this idea. My plan is to be courted by an absolute hottie who will propose by learning how to play Ben Folds’ The Luckiest on piano.
There’s just one inconvenience: I don’t know anyone whose marriage I even like. Everyone I know is either divorced or in a marriage that seems to stink. A good marriage feels both lucky and unattainable, like being allowed to buy sugar cereal at the grocery store. Still it is the only conceivable goal.
Segue 🕊
In many of my memories, my mother can be found in the bedroom lying down during the day. She is less sad when she plays Scrabble with my aunt, or when I find her barefoot on the linoleum & huddled over the sink, silently eating a previously hidden ice pop, or any other time she isn’t with my dad. I watch her complete two more pregnancies. I don’t see much kissing, hugging, or affection. Not that PDA implies anything meaningful. But like many children, I’m pretty good at reading subtext. Something is off.
Physical intimacy is so stigmatized that it becomes strange.
It’s so strange that I am fascinated by it to the point of obsession. My older brother, who did not attend purity camp (was there even one for boys?) has been caught “necking”. How disgusting! But my brother is not in trouble. I’m in a terrible mood that evening. “Quit your whining,” dad says. “You’re just jealous”.
Of course I’m not jealous! How could anyone think that???!! Yet I keep burning to be hugged and… frenched, knowing it is utterly wrong of me. Panicked, I remind myself of what matters: that I keep myself white as snow. Even though we’ve already sinned and fallen short the glory of God [Romans 3:23], we’ve got to keep trying.
After all:
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.” [Proverbs 3:5]. This verse is so melodic and wise, I repeat it to myself in times of confusion. I don’t have to know myself, because God does.
After all:
“The heart is deceitful above all things / and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” [Jeremiah 17:9]
After all:
“Whoever trusts in his own mind is a fool.” [Proverbs 28:26].
Epilogue 🕊
Deconstruction happens in waves. For example, it takes more than one sexual partner for me to understand what using protection means. It takes me over 30 years to fully conflate “child marriage” with my own parents. Whenever someone low key flexes that they challenged authority in their childhood, a small piece of me deflates. Not me.
It is not Neo waking up and knowing Kung Fu. It is not a surprise party, opening a door and turning on a light. It is a sunrise happening at 1/500th speed. It is learning different syntax. It is a redwood tree noiselessly continuing upward year after year.
I try speaking to myself the way I needed to be spoken to back then. I say, it’s OK that you feel this way. I say, what do you think and why? I say, you know yourself best.
Maybe somewhere, little me is transforming.
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NOTES
///About I Kissed Dating Goodbye: The author, Joshua Harris, has since made a documentary denouncing the book. He publicly apologized to those harmed by the book’s message. He is now separated from his wife AND Christianity. Watching the documentary, I couldn’t stop crying. I didn’t realize how much reading the book as a child affected me until recently searching for it online.
///About True Love Waits: Here’s a timeline smugly detailing its rise to prominence. TLDR: a concept developed and sold to churches nationwide by adults obsessed with controlling peoples sex lives. It was engraved on a ring and worn on the ring finger, given by a father to his daughter. Because that’s not weird at all!
///About legalism: Noun: Excessive adherence to law or formula. Strict, literal, or excessive conformity to the law or to a religious or moral code.
///About one of the many songs featuring the amazing stain removing effect of Jesus’s blood 🩸: I used to marvel at the idea that something so red and dense could actually make something more clean! I didn’t understand the figurativeness of the Bible. Neither, it seems, did anyone else I knew.
1 What can wash away my sin?
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.
What can make me whole again?
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.
Refrain:
O precious is the flow
that makes me white as snow;
no other fount I know;
nothing but the blood of Jesus.
No offense y’all… but that’s some horror movie shit.
///About cherry picking Bible verses:
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Hmmm. Maybe that’s a different essay.
///About Neo suddenly knowing Kung Fu (because this is relevant no matter what, in any context, and who can even beat this absolutely wild scene? It’s perfect)
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